Nearly half of all new RPA clients will come from business buyers outside the IT organisation by 2024, said Gartner recently.
“Leading RPA software vendors have successfully targeted CFOs and COOs, instead of IT alone,” said Fabrizio Biscotti, research vice president at Gartner. “They like the quick deployment of low-code/no-code automation.”
The challenge business users have is integrating RPA successfully across heterogeneous, changing environments, which is where IT coordination can make the difference, Biscotti pointed out.
RPA revenue growth
Global RPA software revenue is projected to reach $1.89 billion in 2021, an increase of 19.5% from 2020, according to the research firm.
Despite economic pressures caused by the current pandemic, the RPA market is still expected to grow at double-digit rates through 2024.
The key driver for RPA projects is their ability to improve process quality, speed and productivity, each of which is increasingly important as organizations try to meet the demands of cost reduction during COVID-19, Biscotti noted.
“Enterprises can quickly make headway on their digital optimisation initiatives by investing in RPA software, and the trend isn’t going away anytime soon,” he predicted.
Worldwide RPA software revenue is expected to reach $1.58 billion in 2020, an increase of 11.9% from 2019, according to Gartner.
Through 2020, average RPA prices are expected to decrease 10% to 15%, with annual 5% to 10% decreases expected in 2021 and 2022, creating strong downward pricing pressure, the research firm added.
Pandemic increases enterprise interest in RPA
Gartner predicts that 90% of large organisations globally will have adopted RPA in some form by 2022 as they look to digitally empower critical business processes through resilience and scalability, while recalibrating human labor and manual effort.
“Gartner anticipates RPA demand to grow and service providers to more consistently push RPA solutions to their clients because of the impact of the pandemic,” said Cathy Tornbohm, distinguished research vice president at Gartner.
The decreased dependency on a human workforce for routine, digital processes will be more attractive to end users not only for cost reduction benefits, but also for insuring their business against future impacts like this pandemic, she added.
Organisations to grow their RPA capacity
Through 2024, large organisations will triple the capacity of their existing RPA portfolios, Gartner estimated.
The majority of new spend will come from large organisations that are purchasing new add-on capacity from their original vendor or partners within the ecosystem, the firm said.
“As organisations grow, they will need to add licenses to run RPA software on additional servers and add additional cores to handle the load,” said Biscotti. “This trend is a natural reflection of the increasing demands being placed on an organisation’s ‘everywhere’ infrastructure.”
